1.1 The purpose of this website

In light of the increases of rent and lack of affordable housing, there is no wonder why we are seeing an increase in the number of citizens who are homeless. Given that evictions contribute to this problem, and it is a highly understudied phenomenon in Washington, we believe it is important to share these findings with the public as soon as possible to raise awareness to the issue as well as provide tools for policymakers to address this issue. In most contexts, academics publish these types of findings in journals that rarely reach the public eye. Therefore, we created this website to host a living document that will be frequently updated as we find new results. This early version shows the basics of what we have found so far. Over the next year, we will be adding more content and context.

4.1 Eviction Counts

Unlawful Detainer Cases by Washington County

Between 2013 and 2017, 1 in 55 (1.8%) Washingtonian adults faced an eviction. Figure @ref(fig:evictioncounts) shows the number of unlawful detainer court cases from 2004 to 2017 across the state of Washington by county. With the exception of King, most counties experienced a steady count of evictions, with the top five most populated counties facing well over 1,000 evictions per year. King (green) saw a peak in evictions just before the end of the Great Recession, which ended around 2009, tapering off during recovery, and then a steady count from 2012.

While the decline in evictions seems promising, a brief study from the Urban Institute suggests that the loss of affordable housing and a drop in the area’s low-income population coincides with declines in evictions. In other words, declines in evictions may be because King County evicted everyone they could.²⁰ Section 5 goes further into this discussion, but in brief, Washington has lost 76,865 affordable homes at $800 or less since 2012, coinciding with an increase in homelessness that matches Great Recession numbers. Given that eviction is a leading cause of homelessness^{21 22 23} it seems likely that lower evictions might decline when homelessness is high and affordable housing is scarce.

4.2 Default Judgments

Default Judgment Counts and Percents by Washington County

One surprising trend is the number of default judgments (no-shows to court) among unlawful detainers. The figure above shows the count and percent of cases that were default judgments. By count, most occurred during the great recession. However, the percentage of cases that were defaults tells a different story. Spokane County saw a steady trend of about 45% of cases defaulting, while Snohomish, Pierce, and Clark peaked around 45% to 50% in 2006, landing to around 30% and 35% by 2017. King, on the other hand, is above Great Recession percents hovering just under 50%.

The consequence of no-show outcomes almost surely guarantees that the tenant will face the strictest enforcement and costs of an eviction. A recent study in Seattle found that the median court costs for over 1,000 cases in 2017 was $3,129.73, which included owed rent, non-rent charges, and legal costs.²⁴ In addition to the mark of an eviction, these costs compound the already dire consequences of evictions.

4.3 Representation

Average legal representation for all counties in Washington State from 2004 to 2017

One of the suggestions in helping ameliorate the negative affects of an eviction filing is to have legal representation during the court proceedings. The same Seattle study in 2017²⁵ found that defendants that had legal representation were twice as likely to stay in their homes as compared to pro-se representation. Less than 8% of all Washington defendants had an attorney named on their behalf in our data. One caveat to this number is that a named attorney does not equate representation during trial, but rather, there was some attorney working on some part of the case (i.e. not necessarily present before the judge). Realistically, attorney representation at the time of trial would speculatively fall several percentage points below 8% for all defendants. Among all the 39 counties in Washington, only 9 counties had an average representation rate at or above 8%. Figure @ref(fig:representation) shows the average representation for each county from 2004 to 2017, where black dots represent the average and the density bands show the variation in representation over time. King County had the most representation ranging from under 14% to one time to 33% and an average of about 21%. This high level of representation for defendants may be related to the efforts of volunteer law programs such as the Housing Justice Project that represents defendants on the day of their trial. Regardless, the rates of eviction in King County are still some of the highest in the state. The red dots on the left identify the top 5 most populated counties. As you can see, Pierce, Clark, Spokane, and Whatcom counties still have extremely low representation averages below the state average of 8%.

4.4 Sex of the evicted

Female to Male Ratio in Evictions by WA County

Across Washington state, females were evicted 6% more than males (189,053 females, 178,500 males, and 30,143 unknown). However, this distribution is not the same for every county. Figure @ref(fig:ftmratiofig) shows the smoothed averages of the female to male ratio of adult defendants. Pierce, Spokane, Clark, and all “other” counties with less than 700 evictions a year (n = 34) have a higher ratio of around 11% more eviction filings for women than men. King County and neighboring Snohomish County have slightly more men evicted than women at roughly 3% on average.

4.5 Race of the evicted

Race Differences in Evictions for Select WA Counties

The most troubling results from this analysis is the huge racial disparity of Black adults who faced eviction filings. When comparing the court records for three counties to their respective 2012 to 2017 adult population, we find that 9% of Black adults in King County and 17% of Black adults in Pierce faced an eviction within a 5-year period (see Figure @ref(fig:racefig)). Whatcom’s Black population is much smaller (less than 1%) than King (5.5%) and Pierce (6.6%) and only faced an eviction rate of 1.4%. Latinx adults, a population close to the proportion of Black adults in these counties (compositions of 7.6%, 8.1%, and 7% respectively), faced much lower eviction rates of 3% in King, 3.7% in Pierce, and 1.8% in Whatcom. White adults came in third with roughly 1.5% and 2.6% eviction rates while Asian adults faced the lowest rate of 0.5% and 1.7%.²⁶

When comparing each of these racial groups to the White eviction rates, Black adults are evicted 5.5 times more than Whites in King County, 6.8 times more in Pierce, and only .9 less in Whatcom (see Table @ref(tab:racetableev). Latinx adults are evicted 1.9 times and 1.4 times more than whites in King and Pierce and only 10% more in Whatcom. Asian adults are evicted almost half as much as Whites.

5.1 Affordable housing, homelessness, and evictions

Trends in affordable housing, homelessness, and evictions for Washington State

The above figure shows Washington’s trends in affordable housing units at $800, changes in homelessness according to the yearly point in time counts, and and the trend in eviction cases. Overall, we see that around the Great Recession, there was a high rate of homelessness and evictions even when there was more affordable housing. This corresponds with the overall economic crisis at that time where a large proportion of all households faced huge economic disadvantages. After the recovery from the recession, affordable units slightly increased along with declines in homelessness and evictions. However, by 2012, Washington started to lose affordable housing largely to rising rents, where the following year started an increase in homelessness. During this time, evictions kept a steady pace until about 2014 where it started to slump while homelessness took a drastic rise. By 2017, we lost a large portion of affordable housing stock, see homelessness increasing beyond Great Recession numbers, and evictions keeping a steady pace since 2009. It should be noted that while evictions seem down, there are still over 18,000 cases, only a few percentage points down from eight years before.

Given that evictions contributes to homelessness, the steady stream of evictions likely fed people into the homeless population each year while the loss of affordable housing exacerbated the problem. In contrast to the Great Recession, where almost all households felt the economic crisis, the period between 2012 to 2017 seems to have largely impacted low-income households that may not have recovered from losses during the Great Recession. In other words, our overall growing economy over the past eight years may have concealed the danger of housing insecurity among the most vulnerable Washington citizens. Surveys during the point in time count show that each year, over 90% of those counted were from Washington State²⁷ meaning that our homeless population is largely our own people and the myth of the migrant homeless doesn’t hold up. Rather, the Urban Institute Study²⁸ referring to a connection between decreasing evictions and affordable housing as a result of losing low-income households seems to be a likely relationship for Washington as well. In our case, we seem to have fewer households to evict possibly because they have entered into homelessness.

Trends in affordable housing, homelessness, and evictions for King County

When we look solely at King County (above), we see a more pronounced relationship in the decline in evictions and affordable housing along with a rapid increase in homelessness. On a more micro-level, the loss of affordable housing coincides with a decline in evictions potentially because tenants who are evicted:

• face a difficult time finding new housing because of their record;
• are mostly low-income so they cannot afford the fair market rent;
• and even those with housing vouchers have a difficult time finding housing because landlords are hesitant to rent to voucher holders because of stigma and may prefer to receive higher rent from a non-voucher holding tenant.

It is becoming increasingly evident that evictions seems to be one of the direct mechanism between the current housing crisis and increases in homelessness. A recent McKinsey report says that

“[t]he rise in homelessness cannot be explained by population growth or rising poverty, as there has been little of the former, and the latter has fallen.”²⁹

meaning that other mechanisms are at play. While the McKinsey report finds a correlation between the rise in homelessness and the rise in fair-market rent, our report seems to add evictions to this relationship.

5.2 46% of WA renters are rent burdened

Rent Burden: the percent of household income going to rent

Almost half of all renters (46%) are rent burdened. Of those households, close to half of them are paying more than 50% of their income to rent. This means that about 250,000 households are paying between 30% to 50% of their income to rent and another 250,000 are paying over half their income to rent–a combined total of 500,000 households. This leaves a large portion of the population near the brink of losing their homes.

5.3 FMR rent and RB incomes

Rents and incomes need to afford rent

Figure @ref(fig:whocan) above shows the going rents across the state and within the top five most populated counties. On the left-hand side is the HUD fair market rent³⁰ adjusted for 2017 dollars. Washington (the orange line) had rents under $800³¹ in 2003 and saw an average increase to $1,000. When calculating how much income is needed to avoid 30% rent burden,³² $1,000 rent requires an income of $40,000 after taxes. Overall, you can seen that, again, in 2012, rents started to sharply increase in the most populated counties. In King, you need about $90,000 after taxes to afford the conservative estimate $2,200 in rent. In Clark, you need about $65,000 while in Pierce, you need about $55,000.

5.4 Median household incomes by race

Median Household Income by Race and Area Median Income

Finally, when looking at incomes by race (Figure @ref(fig:medinc) above) there are distinctions between different groups. For Washington State (left graph) the overall median household income (green) took a hit during the recession but recovered to about $70,000. By median, we mean that half of the population is above $70,000 and half are below. White median household incomes fall just above the overall median while Asian increased well above reaching upwards of $90,000. Black and Latinx, however, fall below the 80% area median income (AMI) line which signifies “low-income”. Fifty percent signifies very-low-income and 30% signifies extremely-low-income.³³ The right graph shows King County where the overall median falls near white and Asian incomes while Latinx households are just below the low-income threshold and black median incomes are just above the very-low-income threshold. The legacy of segregation in has largely contributed to the consistently low incomes for black and Latinx households where redlining, block-busting, and housing covenants disallowed lending to households of color and access to segregated white neighborhoods that saw improved conditions.